<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">We've talked about this in the past but were overwhelmed by the edge cases and didn't see that much value for all of the work. That may have changed. This was the thinking:<div><br></div><div>We could add a "surname" property to /people/person which would expect <a href="http://www.freebase.com/view/people/family_name">/people/family_name</a></div><div>We could add another property, "given name(s)" to person which would expect <a href="http://www.freebase.com/view/base/givennames/given_name">/givennames/given_name</a></div><div> - this probably should be moved to /people/</div><div> - if a person has more than one known given name, then they would be ordered appropriately</div><div><br></div><div>We would then link people to the appropriate family and given names. This could be done semi-algorithmically, but it would probably suffer from a lot of errors. Questionable mappings (if they could in fact be detected) could be queued up for human review.</div><div><br></div><div>The properties could be added to /people/person and probably some of the most obvious name mappings could happen (particularly if there are people in the community willing to do it.) It would probably burn a couple million primitives.</div><div><br></div><div>This raises a bigger question -- what other things would people like to do with it? See distributions of given names over time? Of geographic distribution of family names?</div><div><br></div><div>R</div><div><br><div><div>On Mar 4, 2009, at 9:46 AM, Ed Laurent wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite">Not sure if/how Metaweb is handling this but I think it's a great idea. This will be especially useful for biblographic import/export down the road. A suggestion is to create a "Person name" type composed of machine readable string properties and then writing a script to populate the properties from words between spaces of Topic names of "Person". There isn't a formal standard that I've seen but most Western people are listed as PersonalName MiddleName (if available or MiddleInitial) SurName. Contingencies would need to be made for "Dr.", "Van", etc. and a validation system could probably be set up using Typewriter. This suggestion is similar to "Scientific name" of "Organism classification".<br> <br>-Ed<br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 12:18 PM, Raymond Yee <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:raymond.yee@gmail.com">raymond.yee@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> I would like to be able to sort topics of /people/person (e.g.,<br> <a href="http://www.freebase.com/view/people/person" target="_blank">http://www.freebase.com/view/people/person</a>) by the person's surname but<br> don't see any generic properties for a person's surname and given name.<br> Am I missing something here or is there no such field in the commons.<br> <br> I realize that modeling personal names is non-trivial (see<br> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_name" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_name</a> for example) -- but having a<br> way to indicate surnames+first names would be very helpful for many topics.<br> <br> I looked around on the data-modeling list archives but couldn't find any<br> discussion around this issue.<br> <br> What should I do to have sorting on surnames?<br> <br> -Raymond<br> _______________________________________________<br> Data-modeling mailing list<br> <a href="mailto:Data-modeling@freebase.com">Data-modeling@freebase.com</a><br> <a href="http://lists.freebase.com/mailman/listinfo/data-modeling" target="_blank">http://lists.freebase.com/mailman/listinfo/data-modeling</a><br> </blockquote></div><br> _______________________________________________<br>Data-modeling mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Data-modeling@freebase.com">Data-modeling@freebase.com</a><br>http://lists.freebase.com/mailman/listinfo/data-modeling<br></blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>